Chapter Thirty-Two: No Explosion
Fury glared at everyone. Every single person in the room got a stern look from him. No one spoke. "Well?" He stood and extended his arms at his sides, begging someone to stand up to him. "Seems like you all have a lot to say about this, so let's get talking about it! Which of you has a question?"
Jane leaned forward slightly in her seat. As her mouth opened and a sound escaped, Thor looked back at her and silenced her with a glance.
"No one?" Fury asked with a sarcastic chortle. "I find that surprising! It seems like every time I make a tough call, I get an endless stream of concerned statements and questions from you lot. Maybe you wouldn't have done the same thing. Maybe all of you are in silent agreement that I've lost my fucking mind. Does that sound right? Well how about this? None of you are being proactive. None of you are making tough calls. You are all content to sit here and wait. Wait for what? An attack? Is it always going to take some big hit, some great loss to motivate you? I see it in hindsight. What I told Sam to do was not a smart move. But I am incapable of lounging in this tower while we have no leads. And I'll remind you that Sam is very much alive. I will apologize to him profusely and thank him for his bravery. As should every one of you."
Eve stared out the window. "And if he had died?"
Fury turned to her and cocked his head curiously. "What?"
"What would you be saying if he had died?"
"I don't dwell on hypotheticals. I choose to live in the present. Now I've admitted that I was wrong and I'd like to get back to the mission at hand!"
Eve bit her lip. She knew she should just be quiet. Then again, holding her tongue was never her strong suit. "I bet Sam would like to get back to the mission at hand. But he's in a hospital bed! Why didn't you come in here and kiss me, huh? Piss Loki off and risk your own life instead of someone else's?"
"You really think that if I came running in here trying to kiss you that-"
"She has kissed stranger people, to be fair," Barton offered.
Fury looked to Barton before snapping back to Eve. "You will never be alone. Not even for a millisecond. Until we catch your maniac lover and slit his throat. Maybe not even then." He turned on his heavy boots and trudged out the door, daring someone to go up against him. No one did.
Natasha came to her bedside. "Sam is okay, try to focus on that. Things are a little tense around here."
"Why didn't you stand up to him?"
"I only get so many of those. I most recently stood up to him to convince him to let you sleep. I have to pick my battles carefully. We all do. He admitted fault, that's really all we can ask for."
Eve rested back on her pillows, feeling empty-but at least well rested. "Sam is really okay? You're not just saying that to keep me docile?"
"Sam is really, really okay."
Eve breathed a sigh of relief and tilted her head back to try and keep the tears trapped in their ducts. She closed her eyes and listened as the crowd dispersed.
Elsewhere
Loki had settled into a corner arm chair with Sasha content in his lap. He stroked the happy animal's fur and stared straight ahead as Darcy paced around the room cleaning up and trying to cope with what was going on. If he didn't need her to be his ally-in some sense of the word, anyway-he would have snapped her in two by now. When she wandered by him for the fifteenth time, stray pieces of clothing clutched in her tight grip, he snatched her wrist.
"Can you possibly give me an estimate about when you'll be done?" He sneered at her.
She tried to pull away from him but his hold was too strong. "I'm no good in a crisis!" She shouted at him as though he would understand and let her go.
"My patience is wearing thin," he grumbled, tempted to take a more hostile approach. Still, he knew that would never work with this girl. The girl who was tasked with watching a dog instead of being given any real responsibility. He was able to read her in an instant, and he knew that for this to work she needed to like him. Somehow.
"Okay, okay, okay," she dropped the clothes onto the floor and took a deep breath. "What are you doing here? What do you want? Go away! Don't be here!" She stamped one foot on the ground. "See that? I don't even know what the fuck to say to you." She looked at him for a long moment. "What products do you use in your hair?"
Loki snickered. "You are remarkably bad at this." It was different from anything he'd ever seen. He'd seen hysterics and remorse and even bravery in the faces of his victims. She was...flummoxed. She understood the severity and her brain abandoned all its impulses and replaced them with nonsense. Unless nonsense was how she usually reacted. If that was the case, this was potentially an impossible scenario. "Why don't you sit down?" He gestured to the bed right behind her.
She plopped down and shook her arm weakly to see if he would let her go. She had a pouty, worried look across her face, with her bottom lip puckered out seemingly unintentionally. Loki exhaled lightly and let her have her arm back. "Thank you," she spoke quietly.
"Have you calmed down?" He asked. Trying to appease her by being patient and even, he shuddered at the thought, kind, was already exhausting him. He kept his end game positioned in clear view ahead of him, resting comfortably in his mind's eye. He let the future give him strength to put up with whatever else this woman had in store for him.
"Yes?"
"That shouldn't be a question. But I'll take it," he started to roll his eyes and stopped himself, closing them to recover. "I need your help."
"What? I can't even be trusted to-"
"I'm sure there are a good many things you can't be trusted to do, and that's why I came to you. You seem like a girl who's made a mistake or two in her day," he laughed lightly and smiled his most charming smile until her cheeks flushed. Too easy. He recalled a fitting idiom. Something about flies and honey. He hated people who did business that way. Necessity was making a fool of him.
"That's true I guess," she wrinkled her lips in a puzzled expression as she thought about all the things she'd gotten wrong over the years. It was a really long list.
"Just think of me as someone who has also made missteps," he looked her in the eyes and dragged her along this absolute farce of a concept. "And I'm looking to make up for them. I've turned over a new leaf."
Darcy smiled and he grinned back at her. It felt nice to lie to someone who made it so easy. Then she started laughing and he pulled back from his elation. "You are so full of shit!" She crossed her arms. He sighed. Again. How much sighing could one person do? "You do understand that I know you took a woman hostage and threw a bus into a building today right?"
"I thought-" Loki grimaced.
"You thought that because I was put on puppy-sitting duty that I don't know what's going on around me? Even if Jane hadn't filled me in on everything before she went to that meeting, you were all over the news. You still are."
He was very tempted to dispose of her. He reigned in his irritation. He changed direction. He adapted. "I thought that your people figured out that was a plot to get Eve alone."
"Whatever. That doesn't change the fact that you threw a bus full of people into a building full of people." She reenacted the vehicle hitting the bakery with her hands and then expanded them out as though everything had exploded.
"There was no explosion," he stated in the most even tone he could manage, some annoyance seeping through.
"Yeah but I bet you wish there had been." She pointed at him and narrowed her eyes. She spoke to him as though they were friends, as though he couldn't kill her without ever having to actually touch her.
"You don't seem to understand what's happening here," he felt his violent impulses starting to boil up in his veins.
"After you got here, I shrieked and paced around and started tidying up. I've reached a sort of zen about the situation. You said you need me for something, you're probably not gonna kill me, especially if you want Eve to love you back."
His mouth hung open slightly. "What?" He snapped.
She laughed and threw her head back. "Like I said. You are so full of shit."
"Stop saying that. Stop saying anything."
She fought to stop her giggles and failed miserably. He found himself on his feet, leaving Sasha to leap to the floor and scamper away. His hand found her throat almost intuitively. She was done laughing quickly and her lips took to quivering. He gave her pulse point a heated squeeze with his thumb before throwing her away from him and stepping toward the door.
She sat up on her elbows and rubbed her neck. "That's not something someone who's turned over a new leaf would do." When he looked back at her she was smirking.
"Do you have no concern for your own safety? You would taunt me? Taunt me? Taunt me?"
"I'm just saying. You proved my point! Now get to your point-what do you want? Just be honest."
He took his seat across from her again and Sasha ran quickly to jump into his lap once more. "I need to speak to Eve," he said, "I can't get to her with everyone always around."
"So your first idea was to throw a-"
"Yes! Can you get a message to her?"
Darcy shrugged her shoulders. "I don't see why not. I do have a keycard now. What do you want to tell her?"
Loki curled up in his own head. There were hundreds of things he wanted to tell her. But none of them were clear. He tried dragging one singular thought out of the tangle and pinning it down. It was nothing. It slipped away. He just knew he had a lot to say. "I need to apologize."
A/N:
Fun fact, 32 is my favorite number. Not-so-fun-fact, I'm bummed that Loki's cameo got cut from Ultron D: Counting down the days to Ragnarok...
Oh and sorry for the wait! Lots going on in my stupid real life. If I could live at my computer desk and always be writing, that's what I'd do 3
